Bartlet4America News Archive

Lowe Flying High

By PHIL ROSENTHAL
Chicago Sun-Times

Plenty of TV series rip stories from yesterday's headlines. "The West Wing" tends to rip its stories from headlines that haven't been written yet.

Its version of India invaded Kashmir two weeks before the real one did. An African leader was murdered on the show before Congo's president was killed. Its Colombian bloodbath coincided with a real one. And its debates over the census and campaign reform anticipated those on Capitol Hill.

For the last month or two, creator Aaron Sorkin has been working on this Wednesday's episode, which touches on a presidential pardon and on an FBI espionage investigation. Nice timing, huh?

"The presidential pardon thing, at the point we were doing this, nobody thought that had any legs at all," Rob Lowe said Monday. "It was pre-Hugh Rodham, pre-Roger Clinton. A lot of that stuff. So that story was not on anybody's radar. And the spy story was a complete fluke. . . . It's really kismet that all these things came together."

It's more than just kismet. It's just another example of why "The West Wing" is TV's best drama.

Lowe gives an Emmy-quality performance as Sam Seaborn, the fast-talking White House staffer walking and sometimes trying to elbow a presidential pardon through the system, learning along the way about his own loyalties, the loyalties of those around him and even Cold War intelligence.

"It was a particularly great piece of writing that Aaron did for me," Lowe said. "You need an episode like this to recharge your batteries. It was like a big fat softball pitch coming down the plate, and you just take a crack at it.

"Sam often gets righteously indignant, and he's almost always right. So one of the things I like about this episode is he gets the carpet yanked out from underneath him and has to face that."

Any entertainment program that gets you to reconsider American history without seeming too much like a civics class is a program with which to be reckoned.

"New facts are particularly devastating for those who say Richard Nixon, for example, just made his name as a Commie basher and tore down Alger Hiss for his own good," Lowe noted. "Nixon was right about Alger Hiss and people don't realize that. Listen, I'm no fan of Richard Nixon, but it turns out that he was right about that."

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, too.

"They were both cause celebres, particularly for liberal Democrats," Lowe noted, "and it turns out they were wrong."

It was just a year ago people thought Lowe was bitter that "The West Wing" had become an ensemble drama rather than a star vehicle for him. ("My good friends the tabloids," he said. "That was a real head-scratcher to me and hurtful.") But it can hardly bother him that he gets one of Sorkin's trademark, center-stage monologues this week.

"It's just [an episode] about betrayal, a show about disillusionment, and that's a scene that anybody can relate to, particularly with what's going on now when I read about this spy case," he said, citing the series' patriotic optimism as its chief appeal.

"We've been through a time of great cynicism in this country and, in a weird way, I think [the fact] that people are so cynical about the process is why the show really works, because it's sort of an antidote," Lowe said. "Americans are optimistic people. We want to believe and deep down we know that our system is the best in the world. This show speaks to that."

So compelling and convincing is its take on White House life, even if it strains reality for dramatic effect, that people are forever trying to connect the dots between the fictional administration and its real-life counterpart. Former White House aide George Stephanopoulous, in his new role as a commentator at ABC News, had Lowe cornered the other day.

"He says: `OK, Rob. Let's cut to the chase. Let's talk about The Big Rumor,' " Lowe said. "I go, `You mean the rumor that I'm playing you?' He goes, `No, the rumor that you're really a Republican.' "

Now there's a headline.

NBC's Political Drama, WEST WING Focuses on Peters Projection Map for Public Schools, On Feb. 28th (9PM EST)

GISCafe.com

AMHERST, Mass.- President Bush move over! President Bartlet has a new view of the world! On NBC's WEST WING, the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality (a fictionalized professional society) pitches President Bartlet's staff to support legislation mandating every public school in America teach geography using the Peters Projection map. Tune in February 28th along with 18 million viewers to find out what happens!!

There are more than 83 million Peters Projection maps in circulation around the world -- most of them in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. This maps has its least circulation, and acceptance, in North America. But this is changing! To order a full-color Peters Projection Map call 1-800-736-1293.

The Peters Projection map developed by Dr. Arno Peters has generated a firestorm of controversy. It has passionate fans and staunch detractors. Conservative Thomas Sowell criticized advocates of ``political correctness'' for supporting the Peters Projection in ``Vision of the Anointed.'' Many faith-based, social justice organizations, including Oxfam, the National Council of the Churches, and the Mennonite Central Committee, support the Peters as being more accurate and more-importantly ... fair to all peoples.

The Peters is in a class of map projections, equal-area maps, that show all countries at true size and true proportion. And what a difference that makes! Suddenly, North America and Europe are taken off center stage. Africa is huge. Greenland, on the familiar Mercator projection, appears to be the same size as Africa. However, Africa (at 11.6 million square miles) is REALLY more than 14 times larger than Greenland (at 0.8 million square miles). This comparison and others can be found at www.petersmap.com

Please feel free to link your web site to our ``Explanation of the Peters Projection Map'' at www.diversophy.com/petersmap.htm

After 2/27/01 access www.diversophy.com/maps.htm to read or download Chapter One of the groundbreaking book ``SEEING THROUGH MAPS: THE POWER OF IMAGES TO SHAPE OUR WORLD VIEW'' by Ward L. Kaiser and Denis Wood. The book reveals the biases inherent in all map projections along with tips for map users to overcome being misled by various maps.

The Peters Projection Map is available at local book and map stores, or from ODT, Inc., PO Box 134, Amherst MA 01004. Call (toll free) 1-800-736-1293; E-mail: Petersmaps@aol.com; or via fax: 413-549-3503.

Inside ‘The West Wing’

By RICK KUSHMAN
The Sacramento Bee

A visit to the set of TV’s most creative prime-time drama

BURBANK — On a rainy Friday morning, Aaron Sorkin is — surprise — late on a script. Sorkin, the creator and writer of "The West Wing," spends his life late on a script.

The truth is, he probably needs to be late, but that isn't the point yet. On this gloomy day, tardy script and all, Sorkin is still excited about the huge night he just had.

He was alone, all by himself, with his 9-week-old daughter, Roxy.

"I completely panicked," he says.

His wife, Julia, an entertainment lawyer, called to say she was coming back from dinner with friends. Sorkin sent the baby nurse home.

"It was the first time I was in charge of seeing that she was alive," he says. "She's really got enough to do on her own. She's dealing with gravity, she's dealing with oxygen right now."

Sorkin was in the den, kind of reading with the TV on, keeping an ear on the baby monitor.

"Not even a minute goes by," he says, "and I'm thinking the monitor probably cost $39.95 and I'm not going to rely on that thing."

So he went upstairs to his bedroom, the room next to Roxy's, and kept both doors open. Then he worried that his TV was keeping her awake.

"I went into her room and thought I'd just read there," Sorkin says, "then I thought turning on the light would keep her awake, too. So I left it off. I just spent 10 minutes sitting in the dark listening to her breathe. But I'll get better at it."

It is exactly the kind of night you can see attached to folks in the Jed Bartlet administration. Certainly deputy communications director Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) or deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) is completely capable of caring for a baby by sitting in the dark. Even C.J. Cregg, for all her panache as Bartlet's press secretary, has moments of towering befuddlement.

Besides admitting that his parenting skills are less than fully honed, Sorkin just gave a small clue to the magic that is "The West Wing." It's that Sorkin — winner of Emmys, Golden Globes and a Peabody, one of the most nimble, soaring writers in American entertainment — has his own little streak of dork.

We're talking the good kind of dork, the genius who steps in puddles, the athlete who knocks over lamps, the chef who burns his breakfast kind of dork. It's also known as humanity.

That matters because "The West Wing," NBC's masterpiece of lofty romanticism, flowing rhythms, noble intentions and kinetic wit, is built, at least in part, on a foundation of good ol' human fallibility and a dash of slapstick. And that's not just Sorkin.

The characters, the people who play them, even the president himself — both the fictional Jed Bartlet and actor Martin Sheen — all exude vulnerability and enough imperfection to make their sacrifices, their acts of honor and kindness, feel more valuable and more touching.

A man who doesn't doubt himself is hard to root for. A woman who never missteps is easy to dismiss.

"I don't think there's a character on the show who hasn't fallen down," Sorkin says. "Because this show is so high-minded, it's always good to do some low comedy."

'The panic serves a purpose'

That show-wide vulnerability is apparent off screen, too. During shooting last month of an intense episode titled "The War at Home," there was Sheen, between takes, charming visitors who bought a trip to the "West Wing" set at a charity auction. "Their prize," he says with the graciousness of Jed Bartlet, "is me."

There was John Spencer, who plays chief of staff Leo McGarry, embarrassed to be seen smoking a cigarette outside the soundstage during a break. "It used to be I quit these things," he says with a small smile.

And there was Dul&eacute Hill, who plays the president's aide Charlie Young, intensely memorizing the lines of Japanese he would have to say later despite the "help" from crew members. "It means, 'Your mother needs a face-lift,' " a sound guy tells Hill.

But let's start across the Warner Bros. Studio lot at Building 146, in the office of Aaron Sorkin, to understand this whole dork thing.

His office has the feel of a guy who writes, or maybe reads, a lot. It has forest-green walls, square and low leather furniture, and an airy feel even on a rainy day. There are candles lit around the room, and Sorkin sits at a drawerless desk under a reading light that makes him look like a 39-year-old law student.

Make no mistake: Despite his stories of certifiable ineptness, Sorkin knows he can write. Besides the awards, his r&eacutesum&eacute includes the Broadway play and film "A Few Good Men," the film "An American President" and the groundbreaking TV series "Sports Night."

Like most writers, part of his mind is convinced that he writes better than pretty much everyone. What makes Sorkin's case special is that he's close to being right.

But that's all in the abstract. That was yesterday. Today there's a new script in front of him, and knowing what he's capable of, or what he's already written, can make writing that script a steep cliff to scale.

Welcome to a writer's world, and that's probably why Sorkin needs to be late. In a word: motivation.

Here he is in a few recent conversations describing the status of a script:

"I got nothing."

"I'm in the weeds."

"We're at Defcon 4."

"I'm on page 7, and I've no idea what happens on page 8."

And on that Friday morning after successfully keeping baby Roxy alive, "The script starting to take shape in my head was due the day before yesterday."

"The panic serves a purpose," Sorkin says. "I'd love for it not to exist in my life, but it must be doing some good.

"Somebody asked me if the popularity of the show or the support from critics adds extra pressure. It would, but I don't notice the difference. It just all melts into one big piece of hideous terror."

Right there, finally, we've reached Sorkin's primal force: terror. And that can stoke a pretty hot creative fire and a sense of perfectionism. Both pervade everything surrounding "The West Wing."

Later that Friday, associate producer Julie Herlocker and editor Janet Ashikaga sat with Sorkin to edit the first cut of the episode they had titled "Bartlet's Thrid State of the Union."

"We're going to spell 'Third' correctly, right?" Sorkin asks right off.

Besides spelling, however, it's easy to see how small the margin is between just good and excellent. They fight for timing and specific looks. Sorkin wants Bartlet's game face showing before he delivers his speech. He wants less anger, more disappointment from Stockard Channing, who plays the first lady, when she braces the president with the line, "We had a deal."

He wants faster cuts, less waiting, tiny things that are hard to notice.

"If there are 904 things to get right," Sorkin says later, "and we do 900 of them, you still want the other four."

He tells a story he read about San Francisco 49ers Hall of Fame receiver Jerry Rice, working out in the off-season, angry at himself for dropping one pass.

"It's March," Sorkin says. "It's months before even the first real practice. Someone asked him why he was so mad. Rice says it's never OK to drop a pass.

"For us, it's never OK to say, 'Hey, it's just television,' " Sorkin says. "It's never OK to say, 'We've won these awards, we can get away with this one.'

"Look, we've aired 36 episodes, and I would take our 36th best and put it next to anything on TV. But that's not good enough. Part of me hopes we'll never relax and go on autopilot."

Is that a danger? "Honestly," he says, "I still don't know how to do the show. I still feel like I got lucky 36 nights in a row."

'We needed a world with layers'

That's another piece of Sorkin's repertoire. He knows nothing, he says, about making television.

"The line is getting less and less credible," says Thomas Schlamme, a "West Wing" executive producer and Sorkin's most trusted partner in show business. On this day, Schlamme is on the other side of the studio lot, on Stage 23, where the show's sets create a maze of halls, offices and regal-looking rooms.

At the moment, he's sitting in a guest chair in the small, busy-looking office of press secretary C.J. Cregg (played with style by Emmy winner Allison Janney), laughing at the concept of a lost Sorkin.

"He gets the structure of television very well," Schlamme says. "Phenomenally well. Has it been a bit of a journey? Sure, but the guy is so brilliant that in his case, it took about an hour."

Schlamme and Sorkin have been working together since they created "Sports Night," the terrific, lighting-quick half-hour mismanaged and canceled last year by ABC after two seasons.

Schlamme is an Emmy-winning director who helped design the look of "ER" and "The Larry Sanders Show" as well as "Sports Night and "The West Wing." His ability to give still scenes energy and texture is another major ingredient in "The West Wing" recipe, and the looks he creates have become the visual embodiment of Sorkin's verbal magic.

"Knowing Aaron and having worked with him, I feel so connected to his writing. That's such an advantage," Schlamme says. "There is so much dialogue compressed into just a few moments, and there are so many deep emotional things going on.

"When we were creating these sets, we knew we needed a world with layers. We have these intensely private moments in this very public place, and we needed to be able to stop anywhere and feel both those things. We also wanted these pools of light so people are constantly coming into brightness and darkness and back to brightness. That all helps the audience feel the emotional things that are happening, even if the policy discussions get away from them."

Schlamme is not exactly a yin to Sorkin's yang, but he is the calmer one. They met five years ago when Sorkin had written pilot scripts for both "The West Wing" and "Sports Night."

"I was getting bombarded by the usual stuff during pilot season, then I saw those two," Schlamme said. "I told my agent, 'Drop everything else and please get me a meeting with those guys.' "

NBC had dibs on "The West Wing," but programmers feared airing a political series while Monica Lewinsky was in the news, so "Sports Night" was moving faster.

ABC and Imagine Television wanted Sorkin, then a theater and movie writer with no TV experience, to work with veteran TV comedy director James Burrows.

The problem was, "Sports Night" was barely a comedy and hardly conventional. And Burrows gave Sorkin a conventional rundown on what he called the cornerstones of situation comedy — you know, one women's neat, the other is sloppy, one guy's smart, the other's a dope.

"I think Aaron freaked a little," Schlamme says.

When Schlamme met Sorkin, a subdued Sorkin asked Schlamme what his foundations for situation comedy were.

"I'm thinking, 'Uh, none,' " says Schlamme. "I wanted to do his script."

Sorkin hired him right there. It's a pairing that's made for some very special television. "Sports Night," though never a ratings hit, won critical acclaim and opened doors for other innovative half-hours, including Fox's "Malcolm in the Middle" and — coming this spring on, of all places, ABC — a complex show from Dennis Leary called "The Job."

"I was more excited about 'The West Wing' because I knew they were going to screw up 'Sports Night,' " Schlamme says.

In contrast, Sorkin and Schlamme say the notes and suggestions they get from NBC and Warner Bros. Television are always smart and constructive.

'It's a Western'

In return, Sorkin, Schlamme and company deliver a gold-plated drama that is patriotic, optimistic, lyrical, complex and sweet — a disparate list of qualities extraordinary for prime-time television.

"The West Wing" won nine Emmys last year after its first season, and this year it's 12th in the ratings, averaging more that 17.5 million viewers.

It's also become a national hour of healing. Amid all our discontent with candidates, elections, scandals and general politics, "The West Wing" offers hope through people whose honesty, intelligence and civic concern are unassailable, no matter what you think of their politics.

"It's a Western," Sorkin says. "It's about romanticism, it's about idealism. It's about being clear that our guys wear the white hats, and when there's a showdown, they'll come through."

The chemistry of Sorkin and Schlamme comes through, even when you talk separately to each man. They bring up the same points, even the same arguments.

Both, for instance, fight to get in and out of big moments quickly. You see it in Schlamme's direction, which has actors move briskly through joke lines so they won't sound like joke lines. And you see it in Sorkin's push not to overdo dramatic images, particularly at the end of the show.

"Aaron's background is the stage. He wants to quickly drop a curtain," Schlamme says. "That's great when you can leave the audience sitting in blackness, but we don't have that option.

"So we get an episode like ('The War at Home,' the finish of a two-parter) with images of coffins coming back. Aaron wants to barely show the image and get out of there. He doesn't want to be maudlin. And I'm saying there's a way to create that imagery and be powerful without going too far."

Coincidentally, when editing "Bartlet's Third," the first half of the two-parter, Sorkin was grumbling about the ending.

"It feels like we stay at the fair 10 seconds too long," Sorkin tells Julie Herlocker and Janet Ashikaga. "I want it to be two seconds too short. The instinct is to do a visual 'West Wing' moment. I'd love it for people not to believe it's over."

The result on the coffin scene is a quiet finish that ends not with the camera on the flag-draped coffins — the maudlin view Sorkin dreaded — but on Bartlet's expressionless face as he watched them go by. A complex, subtle and searing moment.

"When we differ," Schlamme says, "we work on it and talk about it, and we get to the same emotional place."

"Collaboration is about having smart people disagree with you," Sorkin says, sounding a lot like the Leo McGarry character when he hired Republican Ainsley Hayes (Emily Procter). "It's also about standing on couches and shouting at each other because you believe something is right."

'I've done a lot — this is special'

And collaboration is about listening to the smart people around you. It happens in Jed Bartlet's White House, and it happens on Stage 23 when you have actors the caliber of Sheen, Spencer and the rest of this special bunch.

Working on "The War at Home" a couple of days earlier, Sheen and Spencer are doing scenes in the Oval Office, painstaking scenes where Bartlet learns that a rescue attempt in Columbia has left nine Special Forces soldiers dead.

Schlamme is there, but he's not directing this day. Chris Misiano is, and he calls all the actors by their first names except Sheen, whom he refers to almost entirely as the president.

"We need to move this so John and the president can get through," or, "Wait a beat until John and the president turn around," Misiano says. Everyone does that, Schlamme says.

Sheen is working a line. He plays with it, ending going up, going down, trailing off. Each try registers something different: surprise, anger, resignation. At one point, he and Spencer talk. "That's good," Spencer says. "That's a good note."

They will spend all day in this Oval Office, more than 12 hours for a few minutes of airtime. That's not out of line for a show that requires about 100 hours of shooting for each 44-minute episode.

Much of that time, the actors just wait as the technical crew moves and tunes the lighting and the look.

Sheen and Spencer are used to it. They're old pros and old friends, and the air between them feels as comfortable as between Bartlet and his chief aide, McGarry.

During the break, the two actors sit in directors chairs in a hallway outside the Oval Office. Behind them, through the glass doors of the elegant Roosevelt Room, a full admiral is drinking out of a water bottle, an Army colonel is blowing on his Starbucks coffee, a heavily decorated Air Force officer sits with his feet up reading the paper.

The scene through the doors of the Oval Office looks positively treasonous. A dozen crew members, all wearing T-shirts, sweatshirts and jeans, move furniture and lights. One guy puts colored tape on the carpet with the seal of the president, another stands there eating a sandwich.

Sheen doesn't notice the treason, but he sees that publicist Maria Stasi has a brace on her wrist.

"Maria," he says, "what happened to your hand?"

"Answering all your e-mail," she jokes.

"Ah, computers," Sheen says. "Computers are the devil."

"I'm falling apart," she says.

"That happens a lot in the White House," Spencer says.

They kibbitz more until called back to the cameras. As Sheen walks through the Oval Office door, he looks back at Stasi. "No computers in my house," he says, with a forceful Jed Bartlet tone.

A bit later, Sheen stops joking long enough to say the "West Wing" perfectionism pervades everything because they all know what they have.

"I've done a lot," Sheen says. "This is special."

'I love these problems'

Back in Sorkin's office, at ground zero of this perfectionism, Sorkin is changing his story.

When you tell him Schlamme's not buying the I-Don't-Know-TV act, Sorkin laughs, but he's not about to let success creep in too far and soften up anyone.

"I would amend that now," he says. "I don't know how to write a TV series.

"I have terrible difficulty getting traction on long story threads. We're on Episode 38. That's the 38th hour of 'The West Wing.' Whatever internal storytelling mechanism I have, it grew up learning to write two-hour stories. Characters are born, live and die in two hours.

"If we were in the 38th hour of 'A Few Good Men' right now, I don't know what in the world would be happening."

Sorkin says he's trying to rewire his brain, to think across episodes and seasons. And he's turning to late-night TV and reruns of the great shows for some help.

"I'm amazed how these guys did it. I'm amazed what Larry Gelbart or Norman Lear did with their comedies, or how Steven Bochco, David Kelley or David Milch created these characters and shows that lasted years." Sorkin says. "I want to fade out and finish the story, but I have to keep coming back next week."

He gets planning help from his writing staff and from a lineup of consultants with political backgrounds, including Dee Dee Myers, a press secretary for President Clinton; Marlon Fitzwater, a press secretary for former President Bush; and Pat Caddell, a Democratic pollster.

They help compile ideas, issues and details about how offices in Washington run, which all show up in a large blue binder that Sorkin uses, ironically, the way a political candidate uses briefing papers.

"We think of it like stacking firewood for Aaron to use," says co-executive producer Kevin Falls, who runs the rest of the writing staff and deals with the consultants like Myers and Fitzwater. "We'll have five stories going in one episode — that devours a lot of firewood."

Sorkin opens the current binder on his desk and starts thumbing through the sections.

"Right now I'm learning about presidential pardons, White House vacations, the World Bank and spies," he says. "I still need to know more about spies. I'll start writing the script before I know nearly enough about any of these things to really start writing."

And now we're back where we started, with Aaron Sorkin, world-class writer, talking about all the ways he can mess up if he's not very, very careful.

So you have to ask if he wakes up at night wondering what he has gotten himself into.

"I would," Sorkin says, "but I can't fall asleep in the first place.

"Listen, all these problems, these are great problems, they're glamorous problems. I love these problems. I'm really not complaining at all."

But as the conversation ends, he can't resist one more shot at any sense of security he might develop.

"If this were HBO, our season would've been done two episodes ago," Sorkin says. "In England, they're so civilized. The seasons are six episodes long. We'd be in like our fifth season by now. I'm just saying ..."

‘West Wing’ and a Prayer

By NANCY HAUGHT
The Oregonian

The political drama’s religous component adds depth and interest, the creator says

Aaron Sorkin, the man who brought us "The West Wing," has a confession to make: He is not a deeply religious man, he just writes one for TV.

"I'm Jewish, but I never went to Hebrew school," says Sorkin, 39, who grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y. While he spent the seventh grade attending friends' bar mitzvahs, he didn't have his own. "In our family, when the men turned 13, you had a big party." He's making up for it now.

Religion has a recurring role on "The West Wing," one with enough depth and character to earn the Emmy-award-winning series praise from Catholics in Media Associates for its portrayal of Judeo-Christian values and the Humanitas Prize for affirming the dignity of all people.

As real-life politicos ponder George W. Bush's religious references, about 18 million "West Wing" fans tune in weekly to see firsthand the struggles of a president who -- unlike most of his movie and television predecessors -- is not just generically Christian.

Josiah "Jed" Bartlet, whom Sorkin apparently did not create in his own image, is religious in particular terms. Played by Martin Sheen, Bartlet is a Roman Catholic, an economist who almost became a priest, a man who prays the rosary in the Oval Office, personally opposes both abortion and capital punishment, publicly defends gay rights and a woman's right to choose and takes on all Scripture-quoting comers, trading Bible-verse volleys with born-again fervor. He's a true believer in both God and the Constitution, and a little battered for being caught between the two on more than one occasion.

As a writer, Sorkin says he looks for these points of conflict for their dramatic tension and the depth they add to his characters. He expects Bartlet to continue to find himself in the hard places between personal faith and public duty.

"I'd like to see him struggling over it more," he says. "Because the fact of the matter is when you're the president of this country you're the president of an awful lot of people who think many, many different ways."

"The West Wing" bucks the trend in prime time television, says William D. Romanowski, author of "Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture." It's more common for television shows to shy away from the particulars of religious experience in favor of a more general approach to spirituality, Romanowski says.

In that way, programs such as "Touched by an Angel" appeal to baby boomer interest in spirituality without risking detailed portrayals of any particular religious tradition, he says. Other shows, such as "Law & Order," may deal with religious issues from time to time, but it's still rare for a popular prime time series to feature religion prominently, consistently and in particular terms.

"If the president on 'The West Wing' is Catholic, practicing and consistent about it, that's a positive thing," says Romanowski, who teaches at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich. Although 80 to 90 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians, he says, far fewer know much about their faith. A show such as "The West Wing" can educate as well as entertain.

It can also chip away at what pop-culture critic Robert Thompson calls "this age of hip irony."

"To make this guy a practicing Catholic who crosses himself before major events in his life creates a powerful sense of the earnest leader," says Thompson, a Syracuse University professor and director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television.

As Bartlet's character unfolds from episode to episode, Thompson says, "we get a sense that he really believes in God, that he's not using him as a campaign consultant or dropping his name in speeches. . . . One gets the sense that this isn't just stained-glass-window-dressing."

For Sorkin, making Bartlet a deeply religious man and weaving religious themes through "West Wing" plots is a way of redeeming religion.

"Growing up, it was very easy for me to think, as it is very easy for a lot of people to think, that religion -- that most often one should be suspicious of it. That most often it's an instrument of hypocrisy or, worse yet, of bullying: 'You're not living your life the way I would have you live it, the way God would have you live it. Therefore, God is going to punish you; you are somehow less in God's eyes.' Obviously, that kind of thing is insidious and terrible, and I point to that often on 'The West Wing.'

"But what I want to make sure to point to just as often is the way in which faith can be magnificent, an enormous comfort and an incredible road map."

It is also, for Bartlet, complicated. "We hear in the pilot episode," Sorkin says, "that he doesn't like abortion and that he goes around the country encouraging young women not to have them, but that he absolutely does not believe that is something that the state can legislate."

In other episodes, Bartlet spars with members of the Christian right over gay marriage and school prayer. He wrestles with his own conscience over the death penalty. He lashes out with Scripture when it suits him, and sits humbled before a Chinese refugee whose command of the New Testament puts Bartlet to shame.

Sorkin relies on an informal network of consultants to help him flesh out religious arguments and find the language of faith. When, last season, the Bartlet White House wrestled with whether to stay an execution, Sorkin e-mailed his own rabbi.

"I said, 'This is what I'm writing about right now. Do you have any thoughts?' And, oh, boy, did he." The result was a passionate speech by a rabbi to Toby Ziegler, Bartlet's communications director (played by Richard Schiff). For that same episode, Sorkin talked to a Catholic priest, a Baptist minister and a Quaker.

"People are very willing -- in fact, they're eager -- to put their two cents in," Sorkin says. "I think they really like the fact that the conversation is taking place at all in prime time television."

Sorkin is delighted that his Thanksgiving episode on the plight of persecuted Chinese Christians sparked morning-after questions about the biblical origins of "shibboleth" (Judges 12:6), and that Bartlet's tirade against a conservative Christian radio personality (borrowed from an Internet open letter to controversial radio host Laura Schlessinger) had viewers turning to Exodus and Leviticus to see for themselves what the Bible says about selected crimes and punishment.

Sorkin hopes his characters -- which he describes as "smart and sensitive and attractive," in a you'd-like-to-have-them-to-dinner way -- inspire real-life people to talk more about religion, too. "That's how it happened to me," he says.

When, a few years ago, Bill Moyers televised a public television series of conversations on the book of Genesis, Sorkin says he was hooked. "It was fantastic to see these brilliant people . . . having these fascinating conversations about Genesis and the Bible," he says. "And I thought, boy, I want to start one of these conversations, too -- the upshot of which was essentially that God is extremely more complicated than we can imagine.

"Anybody who didn't get drawn into their TV set during that -- I don't know what they were listening to."

Clearly, Sorkin was listening.

‘West Wing’-ers honored by Phoenix for abuse recovery

By BORYS KIT
The Hollywood Reporter

Humanity's capacity for renewal was saluted Monday night as "The West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin and actors John Spencer and Martin Sheen received the Phoenix Rising Award for their personal victories over substance abuse and talked about their roads to recovery.

The Phoenix House, a national drug and alcohol abuse treatment, education and prevention agency, handed out the awards, in the shape of a large crystal bowl, at a fund-raising dinner attended by more than 300 people at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

Sorkin, whose credits include creator/writer/executive producer of ABC's "Sports Night" and screenwriter of the 1992 film "A Few Good Men," recalled the time he checked himself into a treatment center for his cocaine addiction a little more than five years ago. It cost him $15,000 for a 28-day stay. He said he did what a lot of people do when they're sick and go to the hospital: He filed a claim with his insurance company — and had his claim rejected.

"And the reason they gave for rejecting it was that they did not feel that my condition was serious enough to warrant the treatment I sought," he said. "And all I could think was, 'They must be doing an awful lot of blow at Blue Cross and Blue Shield if they think my condition isn't serious.'

"My point is that I had $15,000; most people don't (have that kind of money). And those are the people who usually wind up in jail instead of (a treatment center). And that's why it's just wonderful that there are nights like tonight where we can raise money for organizations like Phoenix House."

Sorkin choked up as he spoke about how drugs could have prevented him from enjoying fatherhood with his 12-week-old daughter.

Spencer — who plays Leo McGarry, the White House chief of staff with a history of substance abuse on "West Wing," and stars as an alcoholic in the play "Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine" at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles — said he hit a turning point 11 years ago.

"It was 11 o'clock in the morning, I had already finished a fifth of vodka, I was sitting on the floor of my New York apartment, and I thought I had two choices," Spencer said. "I thought if I could stop everything, perhaps I could get a grip on my life and start again — or stop everything and just stop and die. Luckily, I made the first one. I was given a gift that day — I was given the gift of life."

Spencer said the greatest thing about recovery is the concept of second chances and new beginnings. "The fact that no matter who you are, no matter what you've done, no matter the amount of fear ... there is a chance for a new beginning," he said. "Anyone can have it. We can all have it. We can have it once we make a decision. And this is a remarkable thing."

Sheen was out of town Monday night. Accepting on his behalf was his son Ramone (sic) Estevez.

Presenters included Susan Dey ("L.A. Law"), Dule Hill ("West Wing") and producer Llewellyn Wells. Former NBC honcho Grant Tinker presided over opening and closing remarks, and speeches by Phoenix House president Mitchell Rosenthal, counselor William Smith and Sarah Kipp, a graduate of the program, rounded out the event.

Guests included "West Wing" actors Allison Janney, Emily Proctor, Elizabeth Moss and Melissa Fitzgerald with husband Noah Emmerich, "West Wing" writer-producer Lawrence O'Donnell, "West Wing" co-executive producer Kevin Falls and "Traffic" producer Laura Bickford. "Traffic" actors Luis Guzman and Erika Christensen also made appearances. The evening also included video speeches by Harrison Ford and NBC West Coast president Scott Sassa.

The Two West Wings

By GREGG KILDAY
The Advocate

Even if President Bush applies “don’t ask, don’t tell” to all gay and lesbian issues, the parallel administration on NBC’s The West Wing will continue to give voice to gay concerns

The West Wing is undergoing renovations. Gone is the Clinton administration, which brought an unprecedented number of openly gay and lesbian staffers into the White House. Gone is the hope of a Gore administration—and Al Gore’s promise to undo one of Clinton’s compromises on gay issues, the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that keeps military gays closeted.

Instead, President George W. Bush is settling into the Oval Office. And it appears that all this president’s men aren’t eager to pick up the gay cause. In addition to silencing the military, “don’t ask, don’t tell” could well be elevated to the level of national policy on all matters queer.

But there is still one voice in the White House that refuses to be silenced: It belongs to President Josiah Bartlet, the proudly liberal Democrat who presides each Wednesday evening over NBC’s The West Wing.

Consider:

• Bartlet, played by the equally outspoken Martin Sheen, squares off against a gay Hollywood campaign contributor (Bob Balaban). Refusing to address publicly an antigay bill that has little chance of passing, he thunders, “The worst thing that could possibly happen to gay rights in this country is to put that thing on the debating table.”
• In an episode directed by Advocate columnist Paris Barclay, Bartlet faces a bill that would ban same-sex marriage. “It’s legislative gay bashing,” Bartlet fumes. “How do I put my name to it?” He kills it with a pocket veto.
• Bartlet to a Dr. Laura stand-in: “You might be mistaking this for your monthly meeting of the ignorant tight-ass club.”

The West Wing may be only a TV show, but it’s not just any TV show. In a time when politics often plays out in the media as entertainment—whether the soap opera of the Lewinsky affair or the cliff-hanger of the Florida recount—The West Wing has developed into an entertainment that, at its best, shows more political savvy than most of TV’s windy pundits. Because of that, its political impact could increase during the G.W. era.

Created by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The American President), The West Wing hasn’t hesitated to tackle queer topics. “If there’s a struggle forming on the show, it isn’t finding gay and lesbian issues to write about,” Sorkin says. “It’s saying, 'Gee, I’ve done it four times in the last six episodes, let me back off for a couple, and then I’m going to go to this one I want to do.' ”

No one expects the Bush administration to address gay questions with similar gusto. As she was closing out her White House files in January for transfer to the U.S. Archives, Potter observed, “Bush [has] said that he would eliminate this office, so I doubt anyone will be requesting any of these files any time soon.”

Even if Bush avoids bashing gay causes, the new administration could still turn back gay rights advances made under Clinton, observes Marty Rouse, a gay Clinton appointee to the department of Health and Human Services.

“Outside the Beltway, many Americans won’t notice much change,” he says. “But most people don’t realize how the federal government works. A lesbian may find herself getting more sensitive health care because someone in our department [championed] cultural sensitivity training. If the media and if the mainstream lesbian and gay organizations just focus on the big, sexy issues—how many openly gay appointees there are, executive orders, ENDA [the Employment Non-Discrimination Act]—what we’re going to lose is what’s going on in the bowels of government, where we’ve slowly but surely been moving the ship around.”

Exposing exactly that kind of behind-the-scenes policy making is The West Wing’s forte. And what gives the wonk talk a dramatic urgency is the youthful energy that’s part of the fabric of the show, according to Thomas Schlamme, who produces the show along with Sorkin and ER veteran John Wells. “The core of what Aaron is writing could apply to any administration, but what we took from both the Kennedy and the Clinton administrations is that the men and women working for the president could be youthful—not just older white men,” Schlamme says.

Now a lot of those older white men are heading back to D.C. “Washington is going to see a huge cultural shift,” observes Richard Socarides, who spent seven years in the Clinton White House and was Potter’s predecessor as gay liaison. Still, Socarides holds out hope that the Bush troops won’t march entirely backward. “Obviously, you won’t see as many openly gay people, but they may be looking to put some gay Republicans on the White House staff,” he says. “The world has changed in the past eight years, and life around the Bush White House may be different than it was around his father’s—even if, on policy issues, they don’t support issues at the core of gay civil rights.”

Could Bush’s occupancy of the real-life West Wing give the TV show an even bigger role in the public debate on confrontational topics? “Maybe there will be Democrats who tune in for an hour of escape, but I don’t think the show’s mission changes,” suggests show consultant and former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers. “First and foremost, it’s a good office drama.”

As long as The West Wing is around, though, gays and lesbians can take comfort that their concerns—however they fare in the real D.C.—will continue to find a very public forum for debate.

Kilday also contributes regularly to Premiere and Variety. For the complete story on the two West Wings—including a gay-press exclusive interview with the show’s Allison Janney (who plays C.J. Cregg)—pick up the February 13 issue of The Advocate, on sale January 30.

A Woman of Influence

By PARIS BARCLAY
The Advocate

A candid conference with Allison Janney, The West Wing’s press secretary, C.J. Cregg

BARCLAY: Are you aware of how many gay women admire your character?

JANNEY: It’s not just lesbians. I think all women love C.J. because she’s a woman in power and she’s strong and sexy and still a woman.

And she wears great clothes.

And she wears great clothes.

Whom do you think you’re patterned after? Are you [original Clinton press secretary] Dee Dee Myers meets Katharine Hepburn?

I love that. I think it’s Dee Dee Myers meets Rosalind Russell, maybe with a little Eve Arden thrown in there. Maybe some Maude.

Of the stories that have been told on The West Wing that deal with gay issues, has there been one that touched you?

Well, actually there have been a couple. But the main one was the storyline that was similar to the Matthew Shepard incident. It touched me emotionally on many different levels because of the horrendous, horrible thing that happened—the actual act of what happened—and then the perception of the president [on the show] and of the people around him, who were assuming that the father’s silence was because he was ashamed that his son was gay. C.J.’s instincts were that the father has just lost his son and he’s speechless. It turns out that C.J.’s instincts are right—the father is incredibly upset. But he’s also furious at the president for not standing up for his son’s rights and that the president doesn’t consider his son fit to serve to fight for his country because he was gay. C.J., of course, wanted [the father] to be there at the signing of the hate-crimes bill for public relations reasons, but he couldn’t, because he was angry with the president. It was a great example of the conflicts that people must feel in the White House, having to let politics get in the way of what seems right.

We’re trying to figure out how Aaron Sorkin can write so many different perspectives, including gay people, so well. You’ve been working with him for a couple of years—can you give us any clue?

He’s the most interesting person I think I’ve ever not known. It would be fun to be a fly on the wall in his writing room, because I know the rhythms that he writes in are so specific—I know that he says them out loud and figures out how it comes out of your mouth. Every word is thought out, every “uh” is there for a reason, every “and, if, but.” I don’t know—I guess it’s just incredible intelligence.

How do you feel when people say, “Allison Janney— she’s so fabulous, she must be gay”?

Oh, that’s a compliment, I think. I love that. I’m very flattered. A lot of people think I’m gay, because I’m tall and I’m not married. I think the Star said I was gay because I was dancing with Ellen DeGeneres at a party, which I was. I had the best time dancing with her. Whatever. They can think whatever they want. I’m, you know, a sexual woman.

And you’re happy to be who you are.

I’m happy to be who I am, and people are going to think what they think. If it makes them happy to think I’m gay, let them think I’m gay.

A Few Good Stories

By PARIS BARCLAY
The Advocate

Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing, talks to director Paris Barclay about the battle between politics and drama—and gays in the Bartlet White House

Aaron Sorkin’s office is not far from my own on the Warner Bros. lot, and whenever I stop by, I think, Man, his office is really nice. Not big, but a comfortable writer’s den: booky and woody and leathery—with a Macintosh G4 atop his desk. I’m jealous. He gets to write the best show on television, week in and week out. Oh, well...

On this visit, Sorkin comes in, warm and upbeat as always, and although I know he’s facing a deadline for the current episode, he doesn’t act like it. He’s comfortable and casual and pleases me to no end by actually smoking throughout the interview (I happen to be a junkie for secondhand smoke). Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Fire away, Aaron!

Barclay: Here’s my favorite question: During the Clinton administration, The West Wing was always the parallel administration. Now that it’s Bush time, is it the alternative universe?

Sorkin: Maybe. I was asked the question plenty of times in the months leading up to the election: What would happen to the show if Bush were elected? My honest feeling is, you know, this is fiction. I think its success or failure depends on the same things that the success or failure of other television shows depend on. Real-life events really won’t affect it that much. But I’m not sure whether that’s true or not. I know that when Martin Sheen was asked the question, “What will happen to the show if Bush is elected president?” Martin’s answer was, “Well, I certainly hope we’ll be an ungodly pain in the ass.”

Here’s my theory on The West Wing: I see it functioning as what I call the voice of the loyal opposition, which is people who are patriotic but believe that there are different ways of looking at issues, and giving them a voice. The same way All in the Family and other Norman Lear shows were the voice of the loyal opposition during Nixon and Ford.

Yeah, I think that’s a good point. I like thinking of it as loyal opposition. I like thinking of it as loyal opposition even when there was a Democrat in the White House. We’ve done as many episodes about weak-willed Democrats feeding their own causes. In other words, the Democrats have been the enemy just as much as the Republicans have been the enemy on this show. If there’s an enemy on this show, it’s a lack of conviction, a lack of compassion. So I think we can keep that up no matter who is in office.

Do you think you might actually have a real political voice, though? Because All in the Family and even Steven Bochco’s shows in the ’80s and ’90s had a real influence on public policy and issues of importance to the country.

Yeah, and they did it really well. The reason I’m uncomfortable answering that question is, it feels like something so out of my depth. I’m a fiction writer and a scriptwriter. All I’m trying to do is to captivate you for however long I’ve asked for your attention. In this particular case, we’re telling stories inside the White House because the best stories I can think of to tell are the ones that center around so many of these issues. The way to make it real and the way to make it compelling is to give real full-throated arguments to these issues. That’s what creates the impression that I’m on a soapbox, that I have a political agenda, that I’m trying to persuade you of anything. When, in fact, all I want is to create great arguments and for my characters to have strong positions and hope that I capture you that way.

What inspired you to deal with so many provocative gay issues—more than any other drama on television?

I think that so many gay issues are provocative to me. I feel like, and I guess because I’ve spent my adult life, whether I was in school as a theater major or coming out of school in New York, starting out as a writer in theater and coming out here in Hollywood and working in film and television, the gay issues don’t seem abstract to me. They don’t seem like somebody else’s thing. These are my friends and the people I work with every day. It seems like we have entered a time when gay bashing seems OK somehow.

The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was horrible. It seemed to rubber-stamp the notion that because the majority disapproves of the behavior of the minority, therefore so be it. That’s a terribly dangerous thing. There’s the philosophical reason why. The human reason why is that no one can be allowed to be put down at all. Certainly no one can be allowed to be put down as the result of fear and ignorance. That really needs to be called out every time it happens.

I don’t want to be the white, liberal guy who can get in touch with the feelings of the gay man. I can’t possibly. But I feel comfortable making this observation: Any one who grew up gay or lesbian, I have to believe that there was a struggle there at some point. That there was confusion; there was a feeling that they would be ostracized. It was on some level harder for them than it was for me.

I certainly have to believe that anyone who is gay or lesbian who, after being told repeatedly by their country that in some way there’s some kind of problem with them that needs to be dealt with, and then being told “don’t ask, don’t tell”—and they still want to join the service, they still want to give their life for their country, they still want to do this thing that you couldn’t pay me enough money to do—I can tell you that as an American, that’s absolutely somebody I want. This person is very serious about serving their country.

Go ahead and fight.

I think it is so admirable, and then to have [them] put down. And we’re not talking about extremist radio personalities...congressional leaders stand up and make the kind of preposterous misstatements that they’ve made about homosexuality. If they made similar statements about Jews or blacks, the sky would fall down.

They’d be drummed out of office. Absolutely.

In a half an hour their desk would have to be cleaned out. You don’t feel that same kind of uproar about the gay and lesbian community. You certainly hear it from the gay and lesbian community but not about them. Honestly, if there’s a struggle forming on the show, it isn’t finding gay and lesbian issues to write about, It’s saying, “Gee, I’ve done it four times in the last six episodes, let me back off for a couple, and then I’m going to go to this one I want to do.”

Give it a little bit of a rest. That’s great.

I graduated college in 1983, and so it was really right as I was in school and coming to New York that AIDS awareness became what it was. And like everybody else in show business, once a year I can count on a friend of mine dying. The spread of the disease and the death count of the disease can be attributed at least in part to a Republican administration in the ’80s basically saying, “Well, listen, if it’s just affecting homosexuals, what do we care?”

And your show on African AIDS, the drug companies, was a great way to deal with that issue that wasn’t on the nose. For a lot of gay people, that was a wonderful way to talk about the United States’s response internally and externally.

Absolutely. And with AIDS in Africa you have then the added insult of, “Well, if it’s just Africans, what do we care?” In that episode someone even said, “If it was 25 million Europeans, we [would have] found a cure yesterday.”

Are you aware of how proud gay people who work on the show are of being a part of the show—not just because of the gay issues but because of all the things the show talks about?

I’m really happy to hear that. From time to time, someone on the crew will say something to me. It will be someone I’ve never asked, but I assume that they’re gay, and it’ll mean a lot to me that they think something of it.

That’s a big deal. When you were creating The West Wing, you probably thought about putting a gay person in the administration and dealing with all the things that would happen—

How do you know I haven’t?

I actually don’t know that you haven’t. Oops.

Yeah, I’d like to. I think what I would like to do—and this was part of the point of Charley Lang’s character, [the gay Republican congressman] Skinner.

The first thing I wrote was [the play] A Few Good Men. And in A Few Good Men, one of the two marine defendants is black. Corporal Dawson is black; Wolfgang Bodison played him in the movie and Victor Love played him on Broadway. I remember before we started rehearsals, one of the producers, an older man from a different time, had said something to me like, “Gee, Dawson doesn’t seem very street.” These kinds of things. And, no, he wasn’t. He was a marine like other marines. And there was another black character in the show too, the judge. In neither case did their blackness have anything to do with the character, with the story, what was going on. And that’s what pleased me about that.

I guess the point that Skinner was trying to make [on The West Wing]—what he says is that his entire life doesn’t have to be about being gay. I would like to have a gay character on the show whose sexual orientation is what we all want our sexual orientations to be: a personal matter of privacy. And we can go about our day the way everybody goes about their day. In other words, I don’t think if you have a gay character on the show that they have to do the gay stories. I don’t think Dule [Hill]’s character [Charlie Young] has to do the black stories on the show. Josh [Lyman, played by Bradley Whitford] and Toby [Ziegler, played by Richard Schiff] don’t have to do the Jewish stories. I think one of the better things I can do for everybody is just keep showing how we’re all the same—that Social Security affects everybody, health care affects everybody.

Getting to the humanity—you also led me to another question seems to pop up now: When you have created gay characters, you haven’t created the gay characters that gay people necessarily like to see. The Bob Balaban character [in the first season] is not necessarily a flattering portrayal. He’s a [Hollywood] media mogul, he’s manipulative, he’s driven by ego, and that is embraced. Instead of being opposed, that kind of thing is wonderful. A gay Republican instead of a radically liberal gay Democrat is something that’s really loved.

And I’m glad to hear that’s embraced. Again, I just think that as many gay stories as we’ve done, like gays in the military and the Matthew Shepard story that we did early last year—[the crime on the show was] followed by his parents coming to town for the hate-crimes bill signing. And [press secretary] C.J. [Cregg, played by Allison Janney] has assumed that the father is very quiet and uncomfortable about this because he’s embarrassed that his son is gay—when in fact he is so fumingly pissed at the president for his chickenshit attitude on gay rights in this country that he simply can’t bring himself to be at this bill signing. I think you’re right; it’s an interesting way of putting it—showing gay characters not necessarily the way we want to see them might be the best thing.

We gotta talk about the Dr. Laura scene. It really pleased people, especially that last beat of it, for some unknown reason. When Rob Lowe comes and takes the little apron—for some reason that tickled people to no end.

I’m glad. To me, she is a horrifyingly, staggeringly mean and ignorant person. She should be given access to the airwaves. I’m given access to the airwaves, and there was a good scene to write and I wrote it. Listen, I don’t want to pretend that I’m not passionate about this stuff, that “hey, there was just a scene there and I wrote it.” It’s great when you can catch hold of one that you really feel like, gee, my blood is in this too.

Has Clinton ever seen this show as criticism of him?

I couldn’t possibly tell you. Frankly, I couldn’t tell you for sure if Clinton has seen the show. I have to believe that he has because his aides say that he has. The aides say that’s all Hillary will watch. I don’t know. That’s a good question.

Because when the president, in the episode that I directed, says that this [anti-gay-marriage bill] is “legislative gay bashing,” that’s everything we wish Clinton would have said but didn’t.

Lots of times on the show it’s stuff we wish Clinton would have said but didn’t. That’s a really interesting question. I have no idea [if Clinton has seen the show]. I still have this romantic fantasy of Clinton after all these years, and my fantasy has him watching that moment when [President] Bartlet [played by Martin Sheen] says it’s legislative gay bashing, and [Clinton] saying [to himself], “Yes, it absolutely is,” and somehow being so comfortable with that place in himself that says, “Listen, my job was to stay popular for eight years so I could get things done. This is a TV show where they’re allowed to do that.” The answer is, I don’t know.

Maybe when he has his talk show, he’ll be able to bring you on. The Republican voice that you brought on this season, is that something you want to keep doing? Do you want to balance the argument with the other side within the administration?

For the sake of drama, you want two strong arguments. If two people are going to be arguing about something, anything, the time of day, you want two strong arguments. You don’t want one of our guys beating up a tomato can. It doesn’t seem like they did anything. My favorite moments in arguing are the “God, I never really thought of it that way” kinds of moments. Back to A Few Good Men: Nicholson’s “you can’t handle the truth” speech—part of its power came because of “gee, he has a point. I just heard him defend killing a guy, and he had a point.” So I was looking for a voice for those “you never quite looked at it this way” moments and an unexpected mouth for it to come out of: an attractive young woman.

Do you think you’ll continue to develop that?

Yes, I do. I don’t think that it’s my responsibility to achieve political balance on the show. I don’t think that for every time I say we need gun control that I need someone giving an equal argument saying there’s the Second Amendment.

It’s not equal time.

It isn’t. I’m not a journalist. My responsibility isn’t to the truth, it’s the drama. On the other hand, the best drama is going to be created by two strong arguments. It’s not likely you’re going to hear a strong pro-life argument on the show. I have trouble getting to it; I really do. But it’s possible that what you will hear on the show is that not all people who are pro-life can fit into this mean-spirited shoebox that we tend to— Here’s what you’ll hear on the show: Not everybody who disagrees with you is bad. Not everybody who isn’t a liberal Democrat is mean or greedy or both.

What tidbits you can tell us about what’s coming up?

[Here’s how] I’ll answer that question: The election cycle is simple—we [on The West Wing] live in a parallel universe two years off of the actual one. This past November we were on midterm elections. A new congress was elected. And we met [President] Bartlet in the middle of his first term. So he’s been president for two years now. You start watching the new shows that begin airing after the first of the year and you’ll see they’re gearing up [for reelection]. Toby even has the line, “A president gets to govern for 18 months, and then you gotta get the job again.” So it’s really starting up now. But [for me to give away] tidbits for the future? Paris, you know better than that.

A little something? A little bone that makes him feel special?

I’m not trying to be coy; I’m not trying to keep a secret. I’m about to start writing episode 15 of the season. I have no idea what happens [after that].

Anything more to say to The Advocate’s million readers?

I would like to say the following things: I’d give anything to be a lesbian. And the other is that we are very pleased with the letters that we get. We seemed to be embraced by the gay and lesbian community, many of whom work right on the show.

Sheen slates ‘bad comic’ Bush

By ANDREW DUNCAN
Radio Times Magazine

U.S. actor Martin Sheen, who plays the U.S. president in hit series The West Wing, has said he cannot bear politics and that George W. Bush is a "moron".

Speaking to the Radio Times, Sheen, 60, said he could not imagine why anyone would want to become president, adding he was bewildered by last year's drawn-out election.

Mr. Bush won the closest U.S. election in more than a century last November, after a drawn-out legal battle in Florida.

The actor, best known for his roles in Apocalypse Now and Wall Street, stars in the fictional White House-based TV series, which recently swept the Emmy awards.

Sheen, a prominent Democrat Party supporter, did not mince his words about the Republican president.

"George W. Bush is like a bad comic working the crowd, a moron, if you'll pardon the expression," he said.

He also said the role as president was not one he found remotely desirable.

"Your life is over as soon as you say you want to occupy the Oval Office," he said.

"We elect an institution, the family of the guy, his entourage. He has to be someone with enormous ego who fancies he'll have an impact on history."

'Oddball'

The actor has been arrested 70 times for his involvement in protests for issues such as nuclear disarmament and homelessness.

He went on to also criticise the U.S., saying "Alcoholics Anonymous and jazz are the only original things of importance" it has exported to the rest of the world.

But the West Wing star did lavish praise on President John F. Kennedy, whom he played in a TV drama in 1983.

"These stories of womanising that unravelled after his death made him more substantial and human to me," he said.

"We idealise our leaders, raise them up so we have the power to knock them down. The American psyche is oddball.

"As soon as a man becomes president, suddenly there's no more original sin — as if he isn't going to have a sex life."

'Enormous love'

He also said there was a lot of hypocrisy in politics and he was proud of "fighting it and not giving in".

"I have such an enormous love and respect for him, a heroic man," he said.

"I'm afraid that's a minority view in America, but as time goes by he'll have a different image when we realise his contribution," the actor added.

It is not the first time Sheen has hit headlines with his views.

Last September he endorsed the views of Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman that Hollywood is obsessed with sex and violence.

Sheen, speaking during a visit to his hometown to raise money for the Democratic Party, said: "Half the business called Hollywood is sleaze."

He added: "A lot of what we do has very little to do with art. It has to do with sleaze and gratuitous sex and unnecessary violence."

To hear audio clips from this interview visit the Radio Times website.

Sorkin’s treatment of women gets more annoying

By JOHN LEVESQUE
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Aaron Sorkin is starting to creep me out. I still enjoy "The West Wing," mostly for its crackling wit and idealistic zeal, but Sorkin's treatment of female characters borders on the misogynistic.

I've written about this before, so please forgive the rerun. It's just that Sorkin needs to know he's not doing women any favors, and that anyone who thinks his show is an intelligent alternative to the baseness of something like "Temptation Island" is likely to be disappointed.

Last Wednesday's episode is the latest representative example. White House press secretary C.J. Cregg (Allison Janney) and deputy counsel Ainsley Hayes (Emily Procter) were again placed in situations that made them look like victims of flighty femaleness after sitting in wet paint. More distressing: Sorkin's script belittled them in the presence of men who seemed to enjoy the women's discomfort like drunks at a bachelor party. More distressing, part deux: Probably for the sake of balance, Sorkin had one of his male characters, deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford), also behaving like a doofus, but with one big difference. During his nut-out, Lyman was still the man in control, even if his behavior suggested he ought to be spending the weekend in the Ha-Ha Hilton.

It would be comforting to believe Sorkin is simply letting us see how the real world works and that, inside the Beltway, it's a male-dominated free-for-all where women are treated shamefully. But Sorkin is a self-confessed romantic. He says he likes to create places where the people are intelligent and good, where evil and mean-spiritedness never win. And yet, time after time, Sorkin's women — all of them intelligent and talented — go to a place where men get to make fun of their shortcomings, real or perceived.

This wouldn't be so troubling if Sorkin hadn't done a similar thing with his female characters in the second season of "Sports Night." Two women who started out as bright, strong leaders became borderline bimbos as the series stumbled to cancellation. (With the series airing these days on Comedy Central, it's almost painful to anticipate their demise all over again.)

On "The West Wing," it isn't likely that C.J., Ainsley or anyone else will be mistaken for the sex-obsessed women of "Sports Night" or "Temptation Island." But there are other ways to degrade women without making them sex objects, and Sorkin seems to have embraced them all with the fervor of a man who resents it when women are allowed to have even the teensiest bit of control.

John Levesque is the P-I's television critic. Call him at 206-448-8330 or send e-mail to tvguy@seattle-pi.com

‘West Wing’ Lovers Are in Limbo

By FRAZIER MOORE
Associated Press

Nowhere is Cupid more useful than on prime-time television.

When a TV plotline calls for love, Cupid's arrow can be counted on to pierce the heart in suitably dramatic style, infecting each victim with romance or lust, rapture or longing — whatever the story requires.

Then his fevered patsies will get it together, pair off and tumble into bed. (One of every 10 TV programs includes a scene with characters engaging in sex, at least according to a recent study by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.)

But there are exceptions. Sometimes Cupid slips, his arrow only grazing the heart. Such a wound sets off nagging impulses, all right. But the feeling won't be recognized as love. So how can it be acted upon?

Happy Valentines? Are you kidding? These are TV's lovers in limbo.

Meet mob boss Tony Soprano and Jennifer Melfi, his leggy psychiatrist, who are in the grip of clinical suppression on HBO's “The Sopranos.”

Consider the cosmically connected FBI agents Scully and Mulder, whose hanky-panky during eight seasons on Fox's “The X-Files” has been limited to a chaste kiss (unless, of course, Mulder turns out to be the father of the child Scully is carrying, in which case, all bets are off).

Or just look to “The West Wing” and its clueless twosome, Josh and Donna.

On this hit NBC drama (Wednesday at 9 p.m. EST), Josh Lyman serves as White House deputy chief of staff. Donna Moss is his aide.

What a contrast they strike! Josh is fired-up and cocky, and as rumpled as Donna is sleek. Donna, with her big eyes and down-turned mouth, is Josh's pokerfaced foil and, in her own fractured way, a steadying force.

He is her big brother. She is his mother hen.

One more thing. They are head over heels for each other. But nothing doing. They can no more confront their mutual attraction than stare straight at the sun.

Besides, they've trained their eyes on far more urgent matters. “The West Wing” understands that for many people, love must wait its turn behind other, more pressing demands. For Josh and Donna, the demands of the White House never stop.

So here they are: smart, quick-witted, exhilarated by their work, and busy as heck. And despite the fact that from time to time they date (other people) they are lonely in their crowded lives.

While Josh (Bradley Whitford) was a major presence on the series from the start, his balky entanglement with Donna (played by Janel Moloney, who only this year became a series regular) wasn't part of the original concept.

“But very early on, Aaron saw something in the chemistry between Brad and me,” says Moloney, referring to “West Wing” creator-writer Aaron Sorkin. “In the pilot, there's a scene Aaron wrote one morning and passed on to us to shoot the same day.”

The scene begins as Donna barges into Josh's office.

“I say, 'Put this shirt on.' And he says, 'No.' And I say, 'Josh, you've been wearing the same clothes for 31 hours. Put it on.' And he won't. And then I say, 'All the girls think you look really hot in this shirt.' He puts it on.

“I really think that scene sparked something.”

So does Sorkin, who gives her the credit for making Donna an audience favorite. “Janel turned a recurring character who has a couple of lines every once in a while into what became a weekly set piece: the Josh-Donna Scene.”

A Josh-Donna Scene often finds them shoulder-to-shoulder, coursing through the West Wing offices as their repartee races even faster than they do:

“Are you gonna behave yourself tonight?”
“It's a bachelor party.”
“I'm saying —”
“I can hold my liquor.”
“No, you can't.”
“I can drink with the best of them, Donna!”
“You can't drink with ANY of them, Josh.”
“I'm in politics, OK? I can drink.”
“You have a very sensitive system.”
“I wish you'd stop telling people that. It makes me sound like an idiot.”

Without even fathoming just what it is they share, Josh and Donna prove in scenes like this how intimately they share it.

“It's really fun to play,” says Whitford. “You have these two people who are ga-ga about each other — I mean, just like nuts, way down in their reptilian brain stems. Yet they could not conceivably bring their feelings to the surface.”

Maybe they can't, but “West Wing” fans sure haven't given up hope.

“Even people on the street come up to me and say, 'OK, when are they gonna do it?”' Moloney marvels.

“I'm sure,” says Whitford, “it will bubble over at some point.”

But the role of Cupid falls to Sorkin, who confides that “every time I talk about getting Donna and Josh together, my partner Tommy (Schlamme) shouts, 'No! Wait another year!'

“They are in a tough spot,” Sorkin reasons, “because she works for him. Besides, sexual and romantic tension is, to me, much more fun than taking the tension away by having the sex and romance.”

So — bottom line — viewers shouldn't hold their breath?

“No,” insists Sorkin, “I WANT you to hold your breath. Please DO hold your breath!” Why not? In lieu of heavy breathing, that's what Josh and Donna do.

“West Wing” mastermind divulges state secrets

By ERIC DEGGANS
St. Petersburg Times

For this critic, it was a revelation like a light bulb flicking on.

The realization hit while watching a recent “West Wing” episode dubbed “The Leadership Breakfast,” in which idealistic yet cantankerous Democratic White House communications director Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) gets outfoxed by the new chief of staff of the Republican House majority leader (”Sports Night” alum Felcity Huffman).

A-ha! I thought. This is how they’ll deal with a Bush presidency and the ascendancy of right wing politics in the real world. The Republicans finally get some power.

That simplistic thinking was dashed to bits during a recent conversation with creator/writer Aaron Sorkin, who was calling from the show’s Burbank production office at 8:30 a.m. on a recent Monday, despite winning a Golden Globe award for best TV drama the night before.

“It really isn’t about ... the new Bush White House. ... It’s about opposition,” he says. “You’re going to see opposition on the show, and you’re going to see them making strong, compelling arguments. In our parallel “West Wing” universe, which is two years off from the actual universe, Bartlet’s going to need to start running for re-election. And he’s facing all kinds of opposition — including, by the way, opposition to his left.”

Some of that friction comes from “St. Elsewhere” veteran Ed Begley Jr., playing a Ralph Nader-style left-wing politician who challenges President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) to be more liberal. But the fireworks started in Wednesday’s episode courtesy of Stockard Channing’s recurring First Lady, who skewers the president for overlooking issues she’s championed when he makes his State of the Union speech.

Which is a good thing. Because “The West Wing” lately has seemed a little lost in its own success, nabbing awards and accolades (most recently, three Screen Actors Guild award nominations, including one for best ensemble) while offering episodes that, at times, fall short of the series’ own high standards.

It’s an important time for the show, which faces renewed competition from Fox’s “Temptation Island” for key viewers during an all-important February “sweeps” ratings period.

And with some of the series’ most intriguing characters rarely seen on-screen — including Tim Matheson’s Machiavellian vice president and John Larroquette’s excitable White House counsel — Sorkin faces the added challenge of working some of TV’s most accomplished guest stars in with his crack ensemble cast.

“We have eight regulars. To use a basketball phrase, getting them all their minutes is hard enough as it is,” he notes. “Believe me, it’s a pleasure, but there are a lot of mouths to feed.” Besides the current two-parter on Bartlet’s State of the Union speech (which also features Marlee Matlin’s return as consultant Joey Lucas), the show’s sweeps lineup includes a Feb. 21 episode with former “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” co-star Mary Kay Place as a surgeon general who suggests marijuana isn’t as harmful as cocaine or heroin.

Viewers also get to meet Bartlet’s middle daughter — he has three — who crosses her father on the issue of the surgeon general’s comments. To make sure fans feel included, NBC has also encouraged Web surfers to vote for their favorite episode among 10 listed at http://www.NBCi.com; the two winners will air Feb. 25 (also a clever way to hype two reruns airing on a Sunday night).

“I’ll go on (the fan Web sites) every once and a while, just to hear what people are saying,” Sorkin admits. “It’s fascinating, ... but a little dangerous. Sometimes you start to live and die by what they’re saying — when they don’t like something, you want to kill yourself.”

The salt-and-pepper-haired Sorkin still resists observations that Bartlet’s White House is an idealized Clinton regime, saying many of the show’s real-world parallels came about by accident. “I guess I write a script about five weeks before it’s on television,” he says. “Sometimes in those five weeks, an event will happen almost exactly like what we just did, and it will look like we stole it.”

He cites recent storylines on an India/Pakistan conflict that broke out for real days before the show aired and an episode centered on an assassinated Third World leader that aired as a repeat the day the Congo’s leader was executed.

Sorkin’s greatest agony comes when great political stories break out in real life — and no story brought more torment than the turmoil over the Florida elections recount.

“It was one of the great political stories ever, (but) when there’s a great story in real life, it means it’s a story I can’t tell on the show,” he says. “So with every day that was going by, I was thinking, ‘Stop it already! Stop it! You’re taking all the good stories.’”

The show has always managed to surprise in small ways; getting press secretary C.J. Cregg (Alison Janney) to lip synch British jazz/hip hop guitarist Ronnie Jordan’s “The Jackal” during an office party was the height of hip, obscure reference.

But there’s an undercurrent of schmaltz that at times threatens to overwhelm the proceedings. Critics have gone after the character of Republican lawyer Ainsley Hayes (Emily Procter, who also returns this month), a tough-talking caricature given to windy lectures on responsibility and liberal excess. All this while more intriguing storylines — from the interracial romance between aide Charlie Young and presidential daughter Zoey Bartlet to the president’s hidden struggle with multiple sclerosis — remain underdeveloped or undone.

“I try to write as well as I can, and sometimes I don’t write as well as other times,” says Sorkin, who authored the films “A Few Good Men” and “The American President” before moving to TV with “Sports Night” and “The West Wing.”

And don’t worry about all the awards turning his head much.

“My reaction, generally, after we win an Emmy or Golden Globe, is a minute or two of euphoria before I think — ‘God, now we have to be as good as people just said we were,’” Sorkin adds, laughing. “Believe me, we worry about everything here.”

Bradley Whitford

Entertainment Tonight Online

As Deputy Chief of Staff in "The West Wing," BRADLEY WHITFORD often has to bite the bullet; he never expected to be hit by one.

"I was expecting a much more cynical outlook from these people."
-- Bradley Whitford

ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT: Brad, do you think that Americans actually wish they had as good a functioning government as the one on "The West Wing"?

BRADLEY WHITFORD: You know, that's an interesting question. That's similar to a question that I often get which is, don't we think that we are idealizing the motivations of these characters? And I really have to say that now that we've been to Washington a couple of times, that I really don't think that that's true, in terms of the motivations, because the people I've met at the White House, the people I've met on both sides of the political spectrum, are by and large people who could be making a massive amount of money doing something else and are in Washington because they believe in it. I think the way problems are solved in Washington is slightly less lubricated than what happens when we deal with an issue in an hour.

ET: Those trips that you've made to Washington, what has surprised you or vexed you the most?

BRAD: Well, the biggest surprise really was I was expecting a much more cynical outlook. You know, it's interesting, I was talking to a guy who is a lobbyist who was talking about how Americans feel -- a lot of people know that everybody hates congress but tend to love their congressman. It's kind of like everybody hates the idea of divorce, but is pretty happy that his or her sister left that schmuck.

BRAD: Those people were there because they believed in it. One thing that was shocking to me is the difficulty of getting any bill through congress in an election year -- the way the people attach things that have nothing to do with a particular bill in order to kill it. Also, the response to our show shocked me, truly. When you do a show on the census -- I don't know what the number is -- 13, 14 million people watch it all the way through. And somebody at the White House was saying when they want to talk about something, if they get the news cycle, it's maybe a million people, and if they bring up the census, the channel changes. So an interesting by-product of this show that I guarantee you none of us, least of all AARON (SORKIN, executive producer), expected, was the power of being able to talk about these issues in a way that people will watch. Bradley Whitford and Janel Moloney in "The West Wing."

ET: Could you talk a little bit about what it's like to play that Nick and Nora Charles-type banter with JANEL MOLONEY? Is it really fun?

BRAD: First of all, the show is a hard show anyway because it's moving, and when you're doing a television show, you just have to turn out these pages. The bar has been set very high in terms of production value and in terms of quality of scripts, I think. You want those lines to be down so that you're making sure you're not bumping into this guy when the camera crosses over there. So there's a logistical demand that's tricky, but it's such fun stuff. I think what Aaron has written that you don't see often is two people who are just in their reptilian brain stems mad for each other but they have no idea. And that's an interesting dynamic in a relationship that you don't see very often.

ET: Was there a specific scene or a moment when you realized there was probably something a little more than just a boss-secretary-type relationship?

BRAD: The first day that she shot, I didn't know Janel at all. And we shot one take of this thing, and I went back to AARON (SORKIN), on my knees -- I said, "I love her," because I just thought she was funny without knowing she's funny. Sometimes she knows (laughter). I just loved the relationship right off the bat. Then you get these things from Aaron, like in the Christmas episode, where there's a moment where I give her a gift. Where you realize there's really something here.

ET: Talking about the show being walking and talking, can you talk a little bit about developing your own very individual style of walking?

BRAD: I had no idea that I had this obnoxious arrogant strut. And it's funny because it reminded me of the first time I was ever in a movie. I remember watching it, and you're huge. Seeing my face didn't bother me because I know what that is, but seeing myself walk away from behind, 30 feet away really upset me. But no, I can guarantee you that there was no "Hey, man, I've got to come up with a walk for this."

ET: But is there a self-consciousness now that you've seen it and you have this awareness of how you look -- the swagger

BRAD: No different from the sort of overwhelming self-consciousness I feel anyway about everything.

ET: Brad, when you were in Washington on any of the trips, did you meet the actual Deputy Chief of Staff?

BRAD: Yes, I met, STEVE RICCHETTI, who, again, is one of these guys who I was just tremendously impressed with, who is a very understated, unassuming guy. He has four kids who are toddlers. He's missed a lot of that. He's missed many opportunities to do things in the business world because he believes in this guy and thinks that this is an important thing to do.

ET: Did he talk to you in any detail about any of the things that have happened with Josh? And I'm thinking specifically about the pilot, where Josh really stirred the pot by making the comments that he did on television. Did he say that's nothing I'd ever do?

BRAD: He didn't say that. In fact, in every different White House communications directors, Deputy Chiefs of Staff, their responsibilities covered different areas, dependent upon their relationship with the president. So it was not at all unbelievable to them that I would be more of a front man. I do a lot of stuff in the show, legislative liaison stuff where I'll go to the Hill and just beat the crap out of people. And Steve doesn't do that, but there are guys in his position who have done it in the past.

ET: What impact you think Bush's election will have on the show? How might that affect the audience's reaction to the show?

BRAD: I feel pretty strongly that it won't. Aaron, from his earliest discussions of this said this was never clearly the Clinton administration. This is a fictional administration. And in order to serve -- in order to be legitimate -- we had to pick a side. You can't have an independent president in this day and age and be realistic. So, I know it won't affect the writing, and I don't think it will affect viewership at all.

Oh, Mr. Sheen

By JESSICA BERENS
Sydney Morning Herald

There was something worth watching on TV this summer. The West Wing picked up two Golden Globes for best drama and for the work of its lead actor. Jessica Berens meets Martin Sheen on set.

The Biltmore in downtown Los Angeles is one of the kitschest hotels in California. And that's saying a lot. Composed as a Renaissance fantasy that leaves no cupid unarmed, there are chandeliers, mirrors, curving balustrades, painted ceilings, naked goddesses and sea monsters. Everywhere you look, there is more. Martin Sheen isn't kitsch, although he does admit he's a shameless ham. "I love being an actor," he says. "If I can make a living off fakery and haminess, I'll be as happy as Larry."

So here he is on the ninth floor. Quite short, quite loud, wearing Versace jeans and laughing a lot. Ramon, 36, his second child, works as his personal assistant. "Ramon! Please get me a cappuccino, you know I've always loved you ... He's a tyrant, he's only being nice because you're here ..." Ramon - dark, shy and thin - disappears downstairs in search of a Starbucks while his father reveals himself to be very funny, very principled and very in his element playing the President of the United States of America.

You still think of him as Willard in Apocalypse Now, sailing up the Nung River to meet Kurtz, the devil-god of dark Cambodia. It was a mesmerising performance and one that nearly killed him. Volatile and emotional, he was a wild man who drank and smoked and gambled and never knew how to stop. He collapsed with a heart attack in the middle of the Philippines jungle and was carried off the set on a stretcher. But that was more than 20 years ago.

Sheen's 60 now and the star of The West Wing, a TV show that dramatises the lives of the people working in the Oval Office. Though usually filmed on a sound stage at the Warner Brothers studio, the scenes today are at the Biltmore and there is all the usual hanging around reading the National Enquirer and eating "wholesome" double chocolate-chip cookies. The crew is family, the family is crew. They eat together, play basketball together. "Martin talks to everybody," says Liza Croisette, a stand-in. "But I've noticed that he graduates towards the quiet ones."

The West Wing humanises the lives of the various aides, secretaries and speech writers who are the machinery of Congress. In the US, the show has collected a prime-time audience of about 20 million. One poll during the recent US elections showed that Sheen's character, Josiah Bartlet, would have swept the country with 75 per cent of the vote.

The West Wing has initiated a series of entertaining ironies, thanks in part to the ever-decreasing difference between politics and showbusiness, and to the fact that it was fortunate enough to run in the middle of a presidential election. Bill Clinton loves The West Wing, going so far as to suggest a story line.

Dubbed "The Left Wing" by those who don't like its Democratic bent, the series is written by Aaron Sorkin, a Hollywood screenwriter whose political leanings were crystallised at the age of 11. Campaigning for George McGovern, a veteran liberal trounced by Richard Nixon in 1972, Sorkin was on the street waiting for the motorcade when an old lady grabbed a sign from his hand and hit him over the head with it. He has said that a part of him has been trying to get back at her ever since.

Sorkin's President Bartlet is a liberal Democrat from New Hampshire, and the series, now in its second year in the US, understands that to dramatise this political stance is to imbue it with a dramatic heroism. The characters are human and imperfect and therefore very watchable. Idealistic without being worthy, they are dedicated to noble causes. The result is that the US is watching a primetime series that assumes it has liberal integrity.

"The conservatives are keeping an eye on us," he says. "They are curious about why the program is so popular when the country is so conservative. It is like watching a forbidden fruit being consumed."

Sheen is having the time of his life. Not only is he enjoying playing Bartlet, who is homey and human and the linchpin of the show, but he also appreciates the wider effects that The West Wing is having. He believes, in particular, that the show will attract an interest in public service, a profession that needs more intellects than it attracts. "It is the moral references that are keeping people out," he says. "They don't want their private lives known. But we all have our humanity to deal with whether we are public servants or not. I would never have blamed Mr Clinton for his sexuality, but I would blame him for lying."

Sheen has been a voluble left-wing activist for many years, pursuing a rigorous schedule of disapproval that began in the early 1980s when he met Dan Berrigan, a Catholic priest whose dissent had incurred regular prosecution. In 1986, Sheen joined Berrigan on a demonstration against Reagan's Star Wars program and was arrested. It was, he said later, the happiest day of his life.

He has come out for strawberry workers and against nuclear testing, for gun control and against US involvement in Nicaragua. He is an environmentalist and a pacifist. In 1992, he was arrested outside a factory that supplied parts for nuclear reactors, and faced trespass charges after a demonstration against a hazardous-waste incinerator. In 1995, he was arrested outside the Pentagon and, in the same year, was forced to hide out in a church in Canada to avoid a mob of angry seal hunters on a drunken rampage.

He has been asked to consider an official career in politics, but has long vetoed the idea. Martin Sheen does not want to be a real president. "The republic is safe," he laughs. "I don't have a personal interest in politics per se. I have a great interest in the issues that are publicly debated, but I have a far greater interest in social justice and peace. I could never be free to explore that if I was bound to a constituency. If I was bound to a constituency I would have to foreclose my principles."

Principles, though, are complicated things, entangled as they are in webs of anomaly. The West Wing is broadcast by US network giant NBC. NBC is owned by General Electric, a vast multinational with a long history as one of America's leading defence contractors and of involvement in the nuclear power industry. Together they represent the type of corporate control that dominates the cultural mainstream and funds a dangerous level of self-interest in government: the very issues with which Sheen so vehemently disagrees.

These ironies are not lost on Sheen, nor have they stopped him from doing as he wishes. In August 1999, while working on The West Wing, he attended an anti-nuclear rally in New Mexico. "I have to be aware of what I am doing," he says. "It is hard to live in a Western culture now - make a living, have a bank account - and not be part of the oppression of the Third World." Yes, he could lose his job. "They could let me go tomorrow, but I can't worry about that."

Sheen is a complicated man. Luvvie anecdotes vie with political observations; wisecrack one-liners segue seamlessly into conversations about God, Hitler and the world's resources. Despite a yoga injury he enacts a full rendition of the time Fellini threw him off a set - a story that sees Sheen acting out all the characters, including Fellini, Ava Gardner and a bodyguard. You get "George Bush is a complete moron" followed by a tale about the time Marlon Brando came for dinner ("The children just thought he was a fat guy; they didn't know who he was"). Then "Did you see Billy Elliot? I cried three times", followed by "Can you tell me, is my hair a little askew?"

He loves to chat. It must be his heritage. His mother was Irish, his father Spanish. You can imagine him down the pub, telling stories, having a laugh. The seventh son of 10 children, he grew up "dirt poor" in Dayton, Ohio. His mother, Mary Ann, died when he was 11 and his father, Francisco Estevez, a drill press operator, brought up 10 children, nine of whom were boys. He loved his father, but in February 1959, aged 18, Sheen boarded a Greyhound bus and moved to New York to become an actor. He fell in with the Living Theatre, an avant-garde group of fringe performers, and changed his name from Ramon Estevez to Martin Sheen; the former made him vulnerable to innate racism, the latter was more matinee.

Having appeared in the TV series Hawaii Five-O and Mission: Impossible, he was cast by Terrence Malick in Badlands. In 1970, he moved to Malibu, where he still lives in the same house with his wife of 40 years, Janet, a former art student. They have four children: Emilio, 38, Ramon, 37, Carlos (Charlie), 35, and Renee, 33.

They are a close-knit but emotional family, living a public Hollywood life. Martin and Charlie, long embroiled in a tumultuous relationship, appeared in Wall Street in 1987, the former, as a union leader, conveying the film's voice of moral reason. Stockade, in 1989, saw Martin as a bullying sergeant attempting to pummel Charlie, as Private Bean, into submission. Both had some resonance with reality. By the age of 25, Charlie was out of control. He had charisma, acclaim, talent and money, but he was a drunken maniac. He owned BMWs, Porsches and a yacht, collected handguns, beat up a girlfriend, dated a porn star and, in 1998, after smoking crack for hours, he was rushed to hospital with a suspected heart attack. He escaped from rehab in his limo, at which point his father had him arrested.

Nowadays Charlie is credited with increasing the ratings of Spin City, the TV show in which he replaced Michael J. Fox. He is still flash - his trailer is a million-dollar climate-controlled customised bus, with a zebra bedspread - but nowadays he is described as a "reformed bad boy". It has been a long haul. "I had been praying for Charlie's sobriety for years," says his father. Charlie was surrounded by thugs and guns and his father thought he might die. He organised various "interventions" and at one time asked Clint Eastwood to help out, but Charlie just holed up and took coke. His father did not give up. "Sometimes the addict is not asking for help in language," he says, "but in their behaviour. I asked God to work through me and to show me the way, and that was the choice I had to make. Even though I was frightened, I had him arrested."

Sheen snr is a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, which he came to as a result of his Catholic faith. Yes, he felt guilty. Yes, he knew things had not been easy for his children. Excess had nearly killed him and the children had suffered from this. His wife and the younger ones had been with him on the set of Apocalypse Now when he collapsed. Fourteen-year-old Emilio had already fled to LA following a fist fight with his father, only to be called back to an emergency ward in Manila.

Charlie, aged 10, visited the hospital and was horrified but was the only one who did not cry. His father dates Charlie's paranoia and interest in automatic weapons to this troubled time. Charlie had smoked his first joint by the age of 11. Later, father and son would go to the racetrack and out drinking together. "I was dangerous, hurtful and very selfish," says Sheen. "We drink to kill the pain and to hide the reality that everybody sees. I think alcoholism could be passed on genetically, but I also think we pick up things without knowing that we are picking them up. We deposit our bad stuff as well as our joy to our children and they pick it up. I'm convinced of it."

Family life seems settled and is centred in Malibu. Sheen has three grandchildren: Taylor, 17, and Paloma, 14, are Emilio's children by a former girlfriend, Carey Salley. Cassandra, 16, is Charlie's daughter by Paula Profitt, who became pregnant at 17 when he was 19. There was talk of a termination but Sheen snr, who does not believe in abortion, intervened, setting up a trust fund and providing a house so as Profitt could keep the baby. Charlie, who did not have a relationship with Profitt, did not think it was his father's business. "The boys love the children," he said recently, "as I was sure they would when they had the chance to mature a bit."

Sheen's working day starts at 7am and often finishes very late. He rolls through it with unflagging energy. "It ends when it ends," he says. "Where's Ramon? I suppose he's out selling my clothes ... You know, I love dancing but I can't walk straight ..." Finally, at 6pm, he has a scene. The presidential suit is on, the presidential hair is in place. "Gad," he says, "I look like Richard Nixon." We swirl through the Biltmore to where the cameras are waiting to film his speech at a gala dinner. People bear down on him - ladies in pink jackets, suits in for a convention - all shaking his hand as if he actually is the President. An assistant director walks backwards in front of us, guiding us towards the ballroom. A beard and sneakers approaches. "This is the director," Sheen says. "He knows I'm a windbag. What am I saying?"

"You've got to say, 'God Bless America.'"

"That's very pedestrian," Sheen says. "I'll say a poem instead." The director laughs so much that his fillings show. Now Sheen is fully charged, for he has an audience of extras. He plays to them like a stand-up comedian, quoting W.H. Auden, mouthing the lyrics to Midnight Train to Georgia to see if they can guess what it is, cracking jokes about the Republicans, entertaining himself and everyone else.

After seven or so takes, the extras smiling and clapping, we edge back towards the lifts. People are still coming at him from all sides: assistants, suits, people with mikes. Everyone wants a piece. A German student approaches with love in her eye and a pen in her hand: "I've seen your show about 1,000 times ..."

"You're a lunatic," he laughs. "You godda gedda life."

Behind the Scenes at The West Wing with Cinematographer Tom Del Ruth, ASC

By BOB FISHER
Kodak.com

It isn't everyday that the lead story in The Wall Street Journal focuses on a new episodic TV show. The West Wing earned that distinction on September 14 in the opening lines of a story about the blurring of reality and entertainment. The story mentions that political pollster Patrick Caddell was onboard as a consultant to creator-writer Alan Sorkin (Sports Night). George magazine featured a photo spread on the series, which launched on NBC Television in September, including an interview with Rob Lowe, who plays a key supporting role, talking about memorable political conventions.

Cinematographer Tom Del Ruth, ASC, characterizes the program as a "dramedy" that puts a human face on the personalities in a fictional White House. Martin Sheen is cast in the role of President Josiah Bartlett.

Del Ruth has deep roots in Hollywood. His father was Roy Del Ruth, one of Hollywood's top directors from the 1920s through 1950s. "I was five or six years old when my father took me to visit a set with him for the first time," says Del Ruth. "I decided I wanted to be a cinematographer when I was 10. That's when I started taking pictures with a Kodak Brownie camera."

Del Ruth worked his way through the camera crew system, beginning as an assistant cameraman on The Sand Pebbles in 1966. He worked on Tobruk, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Tora, Tora, Tora, and other classic films. He shot his first feature in 1979, and has subsequently compiled some 70 credits (The Breakfast Club, The Running Man, etc.), including pilots and movies of the week (The X-Files, ER and Jag)."Television movies tend to be driven by the story and characters," he says. "I got into this business because I was interested in telling stories with images."

It is rare for Del Ruth to shoot an episodic series. He explains that while he was shooting the pilot for The West Wing for Warner Bros., the stories, dialogue and all-star cast proved to be an irresistible lure. The show is primarily filmed on magnificent sets emulating the Oval Office and other White House settings at Warner Bros. studio, in Burbank, with establishing shots involving actors photographed in the nation's capital and occasional forays to locations in Los Angeles. Following are excerpts of a conversation:

QUESTION: Is there an overall look or visual style?
DEL RUTH: It is very fast-paced. There is a feeling of urgency in the delivery of lines and a certain kinetic energy in the way people and cameras move. That feeling comes from proximity to the president. It stirs those emotions. I shot almost all scenes with the president in the pilot in amber gold light. It had a painterly, sunset quality. He is a fatherly figure with a bum leg that gives him a human quality, but he is surrounded by an aura of power.

QUESTION: The sets are impressive, but it has to be a huge lighting job.
DEL RUTH: We designed some lights specifically for this program. We refer to them as "Bat" lights. A Bat light is about ten inches high, eighteen inches deep and three feet wide, and it contains six of the new MR16 lamps that are 250 watts each. We put a light grid in front of it and control it with baffles. It produces a substantial amount of light in an interesting configuration. We have about 35 of these hanging on the sets. We have other overhead lights that emulate the patterns of windows on the sets. We have various other lights around the sets, all of them connected to a dimmer board which controls as many as 350 units at any one time. Our dimmer operator can make lighting changes accommodating characters and camera movement. That's important because of how we use a Steadicam for long shots moving through any number of rooms.

QUESTION: What's new about the MR16 lights?
DEL RUTH: One advantage is that they last for 250 hours without burning out, so we aren't taking the time to change bulbs once a day. The Bats are also made of aluminum so they dissipate heat. We use an additional 175 or so MR16 lamps hidden in niches around the sets. They produce a very hard, strong shaft of light that helps accentuate the movements of actors moving through rooms. The faster they walk, the more intense the light seems. It gives a tremendous sense of motion to a scene. When you couple that with our extensive use of the Steadicam, you get a very dynamic feeling.

QUESTION: The sets are important to create a sense of reality?
DEL RUTH: They tell you something about the characters. The Roosevelt room is one of my favorite sets because it's open and it has a real beautiful texture with oxblood-colored walls and slight salmon insets banded in white. It is a great environment for the meetings staged on this set. My gaffer, Jeff Butters, had the art department drill out the backs of columns in this room. He put in very small units that separate the columns from the walls. You get a sense of depth. We have an accent light that picks up Teddy Roosevelt's picture on horseback. With the dimmer board, it takes less then three minutes to bring a room up to shooting level.

QUESTION: Are you usually working with ensemble casts?
DEL RUTH: Sometimes, we've had up to 50 people at meetings or social events, and that's a lighting challenge with a Steadicam, because we are typically covering 360 degrees. That's why we light from above. We can control light and create contrast that lets the audience feel the rich ambience of the White House.

QUESTION: Are you shooting with one or multiple cameras?
DEL RUTH: Usually, we shoot with one camera. If we want a more isolated feeling with a longer lens quality, that calls for a dolly shot. If we want more fluid movement, we use the Steadicam. There is a voyeuristic quality in that we are letting the audience look behind the scenes at the private lives of people in the White House. There is nothing prurient, but you can see how human factors might affect crucial decisions.

QUESTION: So, it is a character-driven story?
DEL RUTH: Exactly. We are constantly developing the characters and giving the audience insights into who they are and how they relate.

QUESTION: How did you prepare to shoot the pilot and series?
DEL RUTH: When I read the script, I could feel the lighting because it was endemic in the word. The scripts don't say, this is a moody or dark sequence. But, the dialog is written in a way that tells you the mood. The White House settings can be elegant, but it can also be harsh. There are scenes, say in the press area, where the quality of light and the mood of the camera are sometimes quasi-documentary style.

QUESTION: Does the look change from week to week based on the story?
DEL RUTH: We try to keep a continuity within the White House depending on the storyline. There are changes in the direction and quality of light. You can't light a program like this MTV-style. People expect a certain elegance in the White House. We explore many different looks in other locations.

QUESTION: Is there signature lighting with the president or other characters?
DEL RUTH: I think you have to play the scene. If a scene puts the President in a heroic light, we subtly change the camera angle and lighting to reflect that. Other times, he isn't bathed in the most favorable light when elements of his personality come in conflict with those that are around him. Each scene has its own meter, tempo and style. We use composition, angles, lens choice, focus and colors to punctuate story points.

QUESTION: Can you give me an example?
DEL RUTH: In the pilot, there is a sequence where Rob Lowe's character discovers he had an affair with someone who turns out to be a prostitute. That's a serious problem for someone close to the President. There is a scene at sunset, where we brought a lot of heavy blue light (full CTB) through grids that invade the room. I attached full CTO orange gel to the bottom of the frame so that the hard light coming in underneath was very gold. The result is that the bottom part of the set was a warmish sunset and the top half was ice cold. As the scene developed, we slowly accentuated the blue, so is felt darker and colder as the character realized his predicament.

QUESTION: Do you think the audience reads these kinds of visual clues?
DEL RUTH: They may not see it, but they feel the mood, and it works in harmony with the actors and helps them find the mood.

QUESTION: How about your use of lenses?
DEL RUTH: We generally stay with a Panaflex Primo zoom, 24 and 50 mm, in most of the scenes in order to capture the depth of the sets. For particularly poignant moments in dialog we may come in a little tighter with longer lenses because that creates a different psychological tension. Like lighting, focal lengths are dictated by the scene. On the Steadicam, we use Ultraspeed lenses or a shorter zoom. There is a scene in an episode where an innuendo could fatally damage someone's reputation. The scene opens with a wide angle, fluid Steadicam shot that brings the characters into a room. The door is slammed and we go directly to a shot with a 250 mm lens, which compresses the characters so they seem like they are literally on top of each other. That dramatically heightens the tension and suggests a conspiracy between certain characters.

QUESTION: Are there spontaneous moments or is every shot totally planned?
DEL RUTH: With actors of this caliber, there are remarkably insightful, extemporaneous movements and delivery of lines. I watch and listen to the actors. It's a question of trust. They have to believe that you're not going to do anything that detracts from their performance or characters.

QUESTION: What about telecine transfer?
DEL RUTH: 4MC does the telecine work. They have done a remarkable job with dailies. They are dead-on most of the time with colors, density and contrast. We shot the pilot with the Kodak Vision 500-speed film, but are shooting the series with the older Eastman EXR 5298 film. It is also a 500-speed film, but it doesn't have the same tonal range. We shot the pilot mainly at stop T-4 to 4.5, because I rated the film for (an exposure index of) 600. I decided to over-expose the 5298 film, and rate it for 320 to keep the grain down. I'm consequently shooting everything about T-2.8 to 3.2. But, don't get me wrong-I'm satisfied with the look.

QUESTION: Are you composing for 16:9 screens?
DEL RUTH: We are composing for 4:3 and protecting the edges of the frame for HDTV. It's a nuisance because the sidelines have to be unoccupied space. Sometimes I'd like to have a light in closer to the sidelines or bring an actor into the frame from a tighter eyeline, but we can't do that and protect the sidelines at the same time.

QUESTION: Are there generally long moving shots or a lot of cuts?
DEL RUTH: We have shot as many as seven and eight pages in one shot without any cuts. We did a shot at the Biltmore Hotel, where we started in a crowded ballroom were the president has finished a speech. He exits and joins his party in the outer hallway. We travel through the hallway down a flight of steps, through the kitchen, down another flight of steps and through an underground tunnel to the motorcade in the alley behind the hotel. We covered several hundred yards weaving through obstacles with constant dialog. The camera operator, Dave Chameides, did a terrific job of picking up on the fluid moves in tune with the dialog.

QUESTION: Is a show like this just about entertainment?
DEL RUTH: I think television is a cultural force that embodies our hopes and aspirations and also the chinks in our armor. We hope The West Wing is entertaining, but we also believe it provides insights into important facets of our lives.

2000 EMMY Nominee - Cinematography for a Single-Camera Series

Winner:
Thomas A. Del Ruth, ASC
The West Wing
Pilot - NBC

Tom Del Ruth began his career as an assistant cameraman on The Sand Pebbles in 1966. He also worked in that role on Tobruk, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Tora, Tora, Tora, and other classic films. He shot his first feature in 1979, and has subsequently compiled some 70 credits (The Breakfast Club, The Running Man, Quicksilver,etc.), including pilots and movies of the week (The X-Files, ER and JAG).

"Television tends to be driven by the story and characters, " he says. "I got into this business because I was interested in telling stories with images. When I read the script for The West Wing pilot, I could feel the lighting because it was endemic in the words. The scripts don't say, 'this is a moody or dark sequence,' but the dialog is written in a way that tells you the mood."

In the nominated episode, the White House staff bustles with activity when it's learned that the president (Martin Sheen) injured himself during a bicycle accident.

"The White House setting can be elegant, but it can also be harsh. There are scenes, say in the press area, where the quality of light and the mood of the camera are sometimes quasi-documentary style. We try to keep continuity within the White House depending on the storyline. There are changes in the direction and quality of light but you can't light a program like this MTV-style. People expect a certain elegance in the White House."